Samar Mansour
Mon, 24 Feb 2014 15:13:00 GMT
Samar Mansour, a first year PGR student at the University of Huddersfield, presented a seminar to the EMERGE group about her research titled ''Strategic Planning and Socio-academic Integration in Higher Education''.
Samar's research aims at exploring how embedding international students’ social experience within the context of strategic planning in higher education alters the strategic decision-making mind set relying on Mintzberg's Emergent Strategy in order to respond to the rapidly changing needs of international students over time. With the increasing number of international students who cross national borders seeking higher education (almost 4.5 million in 2013) along with the slow adaptation process and social stressors due to the cultural diversity on campuses and language barriers, the competition among universities is becoming tough and universities’ role of fulfilling international students’ basic need of feeling home away from home is rising up. It has been declared that strategic planning is a leading instrument that helps the universities in managing change and maintaining sustainable advantage. However, researchers tend to focus their attention on strategic planning of perceived core functions including the academic experience, finance, resource allocation, and research funding, yet, there is no clear picture about the role of the social experience in international education.
This research is motivated by the desire to overcome the social stressors that face international students every day such as having difficulty of building a new social network in the host country, facing adjustment and communication problems, suffering from isolation, loneliness, and homesickness especially in the beginning of the academic year and even mental health problems; considering the stand-out fact that academic problems count for 7% of suicide attempts amongst college students, while social pressures count for 75%
The research main method that gets from the research questions to conclusions is using the University of Huddersfield as a case study. Using a variety of methods as source of evidence including face-to-face semi structured interviews with the university staff members from different organisational levels, focus groups with international students, participant observation, and documents review will strengthen the findings' validity and reliability. This will have useful implications for the future of the higher education system in terms of proposing an alternate perspective on the scope of strategic planning in higher education which is predicted to achieve socio-academic integration and mutual benefits for universities and international students.
